An 18-year-old opened fire on Tuesday at an elementary school in Texas, killing 14 children and a teacher, a drama that plunges America back into the recurring nightmare of school shootings.
President Joe Biden was scheduled to address Americans in the evening from the White House about the tragedy.
The suspect, an 18-year-old, killed 14 children and a teacher “in an excruciating and senseless manner” in the town of Uvalde, Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott told a conference Press.
The alleged shooter, identified as Salvador Ramos, also died in this massacre which affected the town located about 130 kilometers west of San Antonio.
He would have first targeted his grandmother, whose state of health remained to be clarified, before going to school and “abandoning his car” to enter the building with “a handgun” and possibly “a rifle”, according to the governor.
The motives of this attack, one of the worst in a school for years, were for the moment unknown.
– Children from 5 to 7 years old –
The shooting occurred at Robb Primary School, which serves children aged 5 to 7 in Uvalde.
More than 500 children, nearly 90% of Hispanic origin, were studying at the school during the 2020-2021 school year, according to state data.
Videos shared on social networks showed children evacuated in an emergency, running in small groups towards yellow school buses, in front of this establishment with low and flat buildings, typical of the south of the United States.
Two people, a 10-year-old girl and a 66-year-old woman, are still in “critical condition,” University Health Hospital in San Antonio said.
President Joe Biden is “kept informed” of the situation, said his spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre. He will speak Tuesday evening at the end of his tour in Asia.
The White House has also ordered flags to be lowered to half-mast in all public buildings to “honor the victims” of Uvalde.
The attack plunged the country back into the throes of school shootings, which are frequently repeated with shocking images of traumatized students forced to confine themselves to their classrooms before being evacuated by law enforcement and parents panicked, desperate to hear from their children.
– Sterile debate –
The tragedy is reminiscent of that of the elementary school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, where a 20-year-old madman killed 26 people, including twenty children aged 6 and 7, before committing suicide.
Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from this state, “begged” his elected colleagues on Tuesday to act, assuring that these tragedies were not “inevitable”.
“It only happens in this country, and nowhere else. In no other country do children go to school thinking they might get shot.”
America was also particularly marked by a shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17 people, the majority of them teenagers, in 2018.
This new killing, all the more shocking as the victims are children, will not fail to revive criticism of the proliferation of firearms in the United States, a debate which is running practically empty given the absence of hope adoption by Congress of an ambitious national law on the issue.